But What About the Faith? Catholicism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-
Century Spain
Patrick Foley
As the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution approached, one of
the most salient concerns to surface about France's commemoration of
that historic upheaval involved the necessity to redefine the very
nature of what France would be celebrating.1 While the debate over
that query has ranged across a broad spectrum of attitudes toward the
Revolution which has led to various interpretations of that event,
far too little attention has been focused on the legacy of that
convulsion on the histories of other nations. Of utmost importance to
students of religion, such seems to be especially true where the
issue of the Revolution's treatment of organized Christianity demands
reassessment. The French nation can no longer justifiably acclaim
that aspect of the Revolution which _ in the name of liberty,
equality, and fraternity _ swept aside much of the country's
traditional Roman Catholic identity. In like manner, it will no
longer do to couch the interaction between the Roman Catholic Church
and the liberals of nineteenth-century Europe _ the latter to a
considerable extent being heirs of the French Revolution _ almost
exclusively in the terminology of utilitarianism, politics,
economics, and social reform. Perhaps more so than with any other
nation, that kind of interpretation has dominated the recent
scholarship of Spain, particularly in studies written in the English
language.
Although in Spain the liberal assault against the Catholic Church was
not as devastating as in revolutionary France, it was nonetheless
outrageously destructive of the centuries-old sacral character of
that Iberian land. Nowhere was that more in evidence than in the
Spanish liberals' undermining of the Faith itself. During the First
Carlist War (1833-1840) widespread anticlericalism in the form of
rapine, clerical executions and assassinations, exilings, and other
such attacks occurred with regularity. Added to that, commencing in
January 1834 and lasting for four decades, liberals dominated the
ministry and cortes at Madrid and the politics of the provinces,
initiating at first moderate, then increasingly radical, measures
against the Church. However, the main focus of this essay must be one
which calls for a re-thinking of the nature of the interplay between
the Spanish liberals and the Roman Catholic Church in respect to the
impact of that development on the Catholic faith itself in Spain.
Turning to the French antecedents of the Spanish liberals' assault on
Roman Catholicism, Guillaume Bertier de Sauvigny, noted historian at
the Catholic Institute of Paris, has shown in his recent studies of
the Church during the French Revolution that during the years 1789
through 1795, France endured a devastating attack against not only
Roman Catholicism, but Christianity in general.2 A brief summary of
that anti-religious onslaught would highlight the following actions
of various revolutionary factions, as the most significant ones
relative to the undermining of the Catholic religion in France during
that period.
In May 1789 all ecclesiastical properties in France were
nationalized. That offensive, initiated before the French Revolution
actually broke out and carried out in the name of economic progress,
undermined the historical fiscal independence of the Church in
France. With its economic foundation seriously damaged, the French
clergy and religious were later less able to resist additional
revolutionary encroachments into ecclesiastical areas of concern.
Following those initiatives, in February 1790 the French government
outlawed all religious vows for both males and females, claiming that
such oaths were contradictory to basic human liberties. By that act
alone, the Revolution's leaders revealed their disrespect for natural
law as the basis for all jurisprudence: wherein human law must be
promulgated in harmony with natural law, that aspect of the eternal
law which, according to Etienne Gilson, is discovered inscribed in
our own nature.3 The need for human law to be based on natural law,
so thoroughly developed in Thomistic thought, had been central to
Roman Catholic thinking and French legal tradition for centuries.
Continuing on with their aggressions, the revolutionaries then
proclaimed the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy: a set of
decrees which effectively cut off the Church in France from the Holy
See and threatened Roman Catholicism's ecclesiastical and canonical
structure in that country. Had the French clergy and Catholic laity
universally accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a state
church might have emerged in France.4 Some scholars have argued that
an organized attempt to dechristianize France began on 22 September
1792, when the National Convention substituted a revolutionary
calendar in France for the long-accepted Gregorian Calendar, first
used in Roman Catholic lands in 1582.5 Inasmuch as the new
revolutionary calendar eliminated the schema of days, weeks, and
months found in the Gregorian Calendar, Sundays were no longer
recognized, subverting the Church's Sunday Mass attendance
requirement. Moreover, with its adoption of the new calendar, the
revolutionaries expunged from the official national conscience of
France any concept of the Sabbath, religious feast days, and holy
days. Meanwhile, religious orders and congregations _ both male and
female _ were suppressed throughout France. It was perhaps inevitable
that, given the French acceptance of the ideas of the Enlightenment,
promotion of a religion of reason would emerge. Within a short time
"temples of reason" could be seen in several French cities, including
the most famous which was erected in Notre Dame Cathedral.6
As the bloodletting of the Reign of Terror was unleashed on French
society from 1792 through 1794, thousands of "citizens" lost their
lives, were imprisoned, exiled, or simply fled France for safe refuge
in other lands.7 Much of that havoc was wrought on the people under
the auspices of the Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793: a decree
which mandated the arrest, imprisonment, or possible execution of any
French man, woman, or child suspected of refusing to support the
revolution. As a result of that statute an estimated 35,000 to 40,000
French persons were put to death, among them many Roman Catholic
clergy and nuns. Bertier de Sauvigny estimates that an additional
300,000 people were incarcerated in prisons throughout France.8 Also,
during that terrifying era thousands of priests, brothers,
seminarians, nuns, and novices emigrated from France, many of them to
"safe" Catholic nations such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Other
religious emigres were to find their way to England, the United
States, or one or another of the countries of Latin America.9
The French Revolution's onslaught against the Catholic faith pervaded
French society even more completely than has been outlined here. The
assault touched virtually every aspect of Catholic life in that land,
even to the extreme of laying the groundwork for an attempt at
"secularizing" the sacraments in the eyes of the revolutionary
government of the First French Republic.10 Unfortunately, the
people's attraction for the words "liberty, equality, and fraternity"
has often obscured the disastrous impact upon Roman Catholic France
of the antireligious crusade of the French revolutionaries.
Within two decades a similar historical development surfaced in
Catholic Spain, where with the dawn of the nineteenth century and the
outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, the ideas associated with
the French Revolution found their way into the Iberian Peninsula.
According to William J. Callahan, Catholic Church historian at the
University of Toronto, the form of Spanish liberalism that developed
during that period found its origin in:
The utilitarian emphasis of state reform during the eighteenth
century, the critical spirit that had swept through educated opinion
from the 1780s on, the influence of the French revolutionary
constitution of 1791, and more individual patterns of economic
thought.11
During the French occupation of most of Spain in the Peninsular War
(1808-1813), the Spanish cortes met at the city of Cadiz from 1810 to
1813 and fell under the influence of liberals. Seemingly more touched
by the utilitarian nuances of early-nineteenth-century liberalism
than by radically anti-religious attitudes, the Spanish liberals who
dominated the Cadiz cortes were determined to alter the Roman
Catholic Church's traditional posture in society in the name of
modernism. Committed to clerical reform and a diminution of
ecclesiastical institutional wealth and political influence, the
Cadiz cortes liberals offered no real challenge to Spain's historical
Roman Catholic heritage. And in fact the article on religion of the
Cadiz Constitution of 1812, which those very same liberals helped to
promulgate, stated that "the religion of the Spanish nation is and
shall be perpetually, the Apostolic Roman Catholic, the only true
religion. The nation protects it by wise and just laws and prohibits
the exercise of any other whatsoever."12
Once liberalism had made its appearance in Spain however, it became a
mere matter of time until the movement assumed a more radical
character. In power once again in 1820 _ this time at Madrid as a
result of the revolt led by Colonel Rafael de Riego _ the Spanish
liberals began an immediate attack on the Church.13 By 1822 the
liberals themselves had split into moderate and radical factions. The
latter group, commonly referred to as , was destined to
take control of the Spanish cortes and initiate an aggressive
campaign against the Church. This second liberal siege against
Catholicism between 1820 and 1823, featured not only the usual
utilitarian and "enlightened" ministerial and parliamentary efforts
to alter Spain's ecclesiastical institutional structure and economic
base, but in the most extreme of the it introduced into
that land a thrust toward secularization.
During that three-year period, attacks against the Church reminiscent
of the darkest days of the French Revolution were common. The
Inquisition was once again abolished, the Jesuits were expelled for
the second time, monastic orders were suppressed, and the size of
religious communities was so severely restricted that many were
forced to close. In their anxiousness to "modernize" Spain's
ecclesiastical structure, the showed little appreciation
for the sacral importance of the religious orders and congregations
which they attacked. Again, in the name of reform, the -
dominated Spanish cortes of 1822 prohibited any further ordinations
to the priesthood until the cortes' own clerical changes were put
into place.14 In early 1823 those ecclesiastical measures were
implemented throughout Spain, with the organizational and economic
modifications which they imposed upon the Church patterned after
French revolutionary precedents. Diocesan and parochial boundaries
were redrawn to conform more closely with the political map of Spain,
the Church tithe was set aside, a special tax was created ostensibly
to pay the salaries of the clergy and nuns, secularization of male
and female religious communities was vigorously pursued, and papal
authority in that formerly "safe" Roman Catholic stronghold was
systematically ignored.
Even though many liberal clergy supported the actions of the
, others viewed them as aggressive acts of an irreligious
government taken against the Church. Regarding the liberal
ministerial and parliamentary attitude toward the Church, Stanley G.
Payne recently wrote:
Though the more radical rejected Christian identity
altogether, the great majority of Spanish liberals were formal, and
in many cases practicing Catholics. At least one cardinal and four
bishops, as well as hundreds of priests, directly supported the
liberal cause. None of this prevented the liberal government from
adopting a harsh policy toward opposition clerics. Eleven bishops
were exiled and two imprisoned, along with numerous lesser clergy.
The Bishop of Vich was murdered along a roadside, and fifty-four
other ecclesiastics were executed or simply murdered in the province
of Barcelona alone, where all convents and monasteries were closed.15
Callahan labeled the years 1820 through 1823 as a period of "the
Church besieged."16
Before 1823 had passed a French army of King Louis XVIII, a part of
the Holy Alliance of governments reacting against liberal revolutions
in Europe, invaded Spain and helped Spanish traditionalists end their
nation's second experiment with a liberal government. But that three-
year period foreboded more serious threats to the sacral character.
And history shows that the next assault was not long in coming.
In January 1834, a liberal ministry under Prime Minister Francisco
Martinez de la Rosa surfaced at Madrid.17 From that point on,
liberals dominated Spanish politics through to the latter years of
the nineteenth century. They were especially influential between 1834
and 1874. During those years Spain experienced a complex political
metamorphosis, in which the liberals fractionalized into cabals
varying from conservative moderates (), to moderates,
progressives (), democrats, and republicans (the latter
making up the most radical grouping of the liberal camp).
Characteristically, the first two factions pursued diverse courses of
attack against the Church, aimed at adjusting noticeably the
ecclesiastical configuration of Spain, as they each assumed to be
consistent with the needs of a modern nation state. Those two
moderate groups had not intended to challenge the sacral character of
Spanish society; their clerical reforms were to have been
accomplished without a serious threat being made to the Catholic
faith of the Spaniards.18
By way of contrast, the more extreme liberals _ in particular the
radical progressives, democrats, and republicans _ had very different
goals. Falling more, though not exclusively, under the influence of
the eighteenth-century French thinkers, they were quite eager to
contest the historical monolithic Roman Catholicism of Spain. In so
doing, these ultraliberal intellectuals, politicians, businessmen,
writers, and a smattering of other activists increasingly came to
reject any teleological view of Spanish history based upon Roman
Catholic ecclesiology. In their purview, Spain was to emulate other
nineteenth-century societies in proclaiming, in the name of
"liberty," religious egalitarianism. Thus, these liberals saw their
assault on Roman Catholicism as not merely a utilitarian-oriented
political, social, and economic thrust aimed at adjusting the
structure and position of an obscurantist Spanish institution to the
demands of a modern society; theirs was to be an outright scuttling
of the Roman Catholic Church's religious hegemony in Spain. It is
this aspect of the liberals' defiance of Spain's Roman Catholic
heritage that many scholars, especially those writing in the English
language, have ignored.19
Turning to the events which brought the moderate liberal Francisco
Martinez de la Rosa to head the ministry at Madrid, on 10 October
1830, the royal court happily celebrated the birth of a daughter,
Isabel Luisa, to King Fernando VII and his wife, Queen Maria
Cristina. The Spanish monarch's fourth marriage finally produced his
first heir. However, the sovereign's brother, Don Carlos, came forth
to challenge the young 's right to the inheritance, basing
his opposition to her on the Salic Law, which had been in effect in
Spain at the time of Don Carlos' birth. Subsequently, on 20 May 1833,
King Fernando VII formally proclaimed Isabel heiress to the throne
and commenced to extract the customary oaths of loyalty to her from
the ranking lay and ecclesiastical officials of the land.20
From the very beginning of the struggle between the supporters of
Isabel, led by her mother, Queen Regent Maria Cristina, and Don
Carlos and his Carlists, the Spanish clergy were divided in their
loyalties. Matters came to a head when on 29 September 1833 the king
died, leaving Isabel as titular queen. As a result of those
circumstances, on 2 October of that year the dynastic conflict
erupted into civil war, the First Carlist War (1833-1840). Seeking
support for her daughter's claim to the crown from wherever it might
be found, the queen regent approached the moderate liberals, offering
the prime ministership to Martinez de la Rosa on 15 January 1834.21
For the Church, the appearance of a liberal ministry once again at
Madrid presaged a struggle. The combination of a civil war in which
the Carlists favored the interests of the Church and clerical
allegiances were divided, and the reappearance of liberals in the
government who were bent upon "reforming" the ecclesiastical
configuration of Spain, produced an explosive religio-political
environment there. Yet, since the tension passed beyond the days of
the First Carlist War and evolved into three and one-half decades of
difficult struggle between the Church and the multifarious liberal
parties, one focus of contemporary scholarship must be upon its
impact on the Catholic faith of the Spaniards. In that context,
careful distinctions need to be drawn between the contentious issues
ignited mainly by the friction between Queen Isabel II and her
supporters and the Carlists over the succession and other political
questions, as opposed to the antagonisms emanating from the Church-
state battle. It was the latter conflict which most effected the
Faith in traditional Roman Catholic Spain and thus needs serious
study.
The liberals did not take long to build their campaign against the
Church. On 22 April 1834 Maria Cristina, at the urging of Prime
Minister Martinez de la Rosa, established the , a committee formed to recommend clerical reform
initiatives to the government. Just a few months later, on 2
September, the first of the junta's reform measures were enacted.22
Subsequently, manifold other changes were suggested regarding the
composition of the ecclesiastical structure of Spain. This
legislation erected the basic outline for church reform in Spain,
which the crown gradually implemented throughout the rest of the
nineteenth century: though often without the consultation of or
approval by the Holy See, further challenging papal authority in that
former Catholic stronghold.23
Foremost in the junta's program were plans to reorganize the Spanish
cathedral and collegial chapters, redefine diocesan and parish
boundaries, and reduce in number chaplaincies and other clerical
benefices (appointments which carried a living with them). Few
historians would debate the point that nineteenth-century Spain had
inherited a situation in which the Church suffered from having too
many clergy living comfortable but relatively unproductive lives.
Frequently ignored however is the point that the cathedral and
collegial chapters housed a high percentage of Roman Catholicism's
finest Spanish scholars.24 Thus, the quality of Catholic scholarship
in Spain, already in a state of serious decline from its high point
during the period of the fifteenth through the early seventeenth
centuries, suffered at the hands of the junta.
The royal government's assailing of Spain's monasteries and convents
(both frequently called ) had a devastating impact upon
the sacral nature of society. While it is true that the had several influential members of the Catholic
hierarchy as members, none of the committee's recommendations were
sent to the Holy See. Moreover, in many cases the superiors of the
religious orders were not consulted by the Junta about decisions
which effected the very existence of the superiors' own communities.
Regarding the , a broad reorganization was ordered which
established minimum size limits for each religious house. Those
having less than twelve inhabitants were closed. It is
true that such measures were initiated in the utilitarian sense of
efficiency. But in a number of cases, Madrid paid little attention to
the spiritual consequences of their actions on the religious orders
of the nation. The liberals who influenced royal policy paid little
attention to the essence of the desire for monasteries and convents
in a Catholic land, and as a result, the Faith experienced a
sustained loss of spiritual strength from which it never recovered.
Complicating matters further, many of the closed during
the period of the First Carlist war were actually singled out by the
royal government because they were suspected of harboring Carlist
sympathizers among their communities.
From 1834 on, numerous priests, nuns, brothers, and other religious
were murdered, executed, imprisoned, or exiled because of the
tensions of the Isabelline-Carlist struggle. But clearly much of the
clerical slaughter and rapine of those times came as a direct or
indirect result of the anguish stirred up by the actions of the royal
government and its . In his recent study of
the Church in Spain during that period, Professor Callahan offers an
example of just such a situation, writing that:
Hopes for a limited ecclesiastical reform came to an end on a hot
summer day in 1834. On July 17 rioting mobs in Madrid left seventy-
eight Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarians dead and
their residences devastated. Never in Spanish history had there been
such a savage, collective attack on the clergy. For generations of
clerical historians, July 17 was a 'day of infamy'.25
As the years passed, the liberal campaign against the Catholic faith
in Spain intensified. Beginning in 1835 massive disentailment of
ecclesiastical properties and lands took place. Once again carried
out in the name of efficiency and utilitarianism, this seizure of
income-producing property of the Church ultimately forced the Spanish
clergy and other religious to economic dependency upon the state.
Commencing in 1837, clerical incomes were debated in the cortes; and
in 1841 the royal government created a special tax on incomes and
commercial profit throughout the land, aimed at bringing funds into
the state treasury to be used for paying clerical salaries.26 In the
meantime, progressive liberals in the Spanish cortes wrote a new
constitution for the nation (that of 1837) which began to chip away
at Roman Catholicism's religious hegemony. Veering drastically away
from the traditional constitutional statements on religion, which
always identified the Catholic faith as the official religion of
Spain, the 1837 document merely stated that "the nation binds itself
to support the Roman Catholic religion, which the people profess."27
In the mid-1840s the more conservative elements in Spanish liberalism
worked their way to dominant positions in both the ministry and the
cortes, with General Ramon Narvaez being the most influential figure
among them. Rejecting much of the aggressive antireligious thrust of
the progressives whom they supplanted in power, the moderate liberals
were successful in mollifying some of the ruinous effects of the
progressive's attack on the Catholic religion. While the moderates
failed in their attempts to promulgate a with the Holy See
in 1845 (an agreement readjusting the relations between the Spanish
royal government and the Church, though not an official concordat),
they did stabilize church-state relations in Spain and lay the
groundwork for a new concordat with Pope Pius IX to be signed in
1851.28
But in the meantime, what about the Faith? The actions of the
liberals, especially the more radical factions, literally destroyed
the religious communities (both male and female), historically
centers of prayer life and deep spirituality in Catholic Spain. The
population of regular clergy and nuns was devastated, their numbers
being drastically reduced and their living conditions in many cases
being cut back to bare subsistence. One estimate shows a decrease in
the male religious communities from thirty-seven in 1820 to twenty-
seven at the beginning of 1835, to twenty-three by the end of that
year, to a mere eight in 1859. During that same period the total
membership of the regular clergy plummeted from 46,000 to 719.29
Figures for orders and congregations of nuns do not reflect quite
such a drastic reduction, but they were nonetheless dramatic.
The royal government's promotion of secularization of religious
establishments as well as clerical laicization, not only contributed
substantially to the reduction in the number of religious (male and
female), but it also led to confusion about the issue of respective
authority boundaries between royal and Church jurisdictions.
Originally, on 8 March 1836, the Crown issued decrees specifying the
conditions under which members of the religious orders and
congregations would be allowed to return to the lay state. In so
doing, the Spanish government ignored papal authority. In 1836 those
guidelines were meant only for the clergy and nuns not absorbed into
other religious houses of their orders and congregations, as their
own communities were being closed down. Later, however, Madrid made
the process of laicization easier for all ecclesiastical personnel.
Regular clerics and nuns who formed a part of a religious
establishment being secularized, were placed under the authority of
the local diocesan ordinary, rather than be allowed to remain subject
to the jurisdiction of their own superiors. At the same time,
ecclesiastics who had not been ordained as priests or deacons were
reduced to the same civil status as all other Spaniards.30 Where in
this process was there any consideration for the Faith as such?
In the meantime, Spanish radical liberals of the mid-1850s campaigned
to subvert the substance of the Concordat of 1851 between Spain and
the Holy See. That agreement, which was implemented article-by-
article between 5 May 1851 and 3 December 1852, brought order to the
Roman Catholic Church's official position and operating status in
Spain. The document also once again confirmed Roman Catholicism's
religious hegemony over the spiritual lives of the Spanish people. In
1856 the radical liberals attempted to introduce into Spanish society
a quasi-religious liberty, where non-Catholics could profess their
beliefs, but not worship publicly. The Constitution of 1856, which
included that stipulation about religion, remained unpromulgated
however.
In 1869, after Queen Isabel II fled Spain for France, a coalition
provisional government of several radical liberal factions produced
another Spanish constitution, one which guaranteed the right of
public as well as private worship to all peoples, regardless of what
faith they professed.31 While the Constitution of 1869 reflected the
combined efforts of a political coalition of radical progressives,
liberal unionists, and democrats, the final constitutional assault on
the Catholic faith came with the republican revolution of 1873.
Ceasing any governmental pretense that a beneficial reform of the
Catholic Church was their desire, the leaders of the Republic of 1873
attacked openly. They wrote into their Constitution of 1873
statements on religious liberty and complete separation of church and
state. Fortunately, since the Republic of 1873 collapsed after a very
brief time, the 1873 constitution too was never promulgated.
Ultimately, the fall of the republican government on 30 December 1874
and the resultant restoration of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy blunted
the radical liberals' aggressiveness toward Roman Catholicism in that
nation. However, the Catholic Church was never again to enjoy the
unquestioned religious paramountcy in Spanish society that it had
prior to the nineteenth-century liberal ascendancy. For example,
while the Bourbon restoration stemmed the radical liberal onslaught
against Catholicism, that regime's Constitution of 1876, in
redefining the Roman Catholic Church as the religion of Spain, did
allow for non-Catholics to worship privately.32
While Roman Catholicism remained the official spiritual faith of
Spain until after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in
1975, the Catholic Church lost its monopoly over education. More and
more, so-called progressive thinkers have associated Spain's Catholic
past with what they viewed as the obscurantist Old Regime Church.
Endemic to the utilitarianism of the moderate liberals, and
concomitant with the anti-Catholic religious hegemony thrust in Spain
of the radical liberals, the state increasingly assumed a more
visible role in the lives of the Spanish people, often expanding its
activities at the expense of ecclesiastical institutions. Thus it
became steadily more difficult for the Church to maintain throughout
society an historical Roman Catholic teleological view of human
existence, a design molded and formed in the sacral character of
Spain as a nation. It is the significance of this aspect of the
Spanish Catholic legacy which recent Hispanicists have ignored. Under
the influence of such giants of Spanish historiography as the late
Jaime Vicens Vivens and Gerals Brenan, as well as that of Raymond
Carr and Richard Herr, each of whom presumed a secularistic purview
of the Catholic Church's position in the latter's struggle with the
Spanish liberals in the nineteenth-century, most contemporary
historians writing in the English language show little concern for or
understanding of the spiritual essence of Spain's Roman Catholic
heritage. Thus they have been unable to analyze the impact of that
Catholic-liberal conflict on the Faith itself. But the time has now
come to redress that fundamental weakness in scholarship, giving
attention to the question of what about the Faith.
ENDNOTES
1 Paul Poupard, Cardinal, "Liberty, How Many Crimes in Your Name?"
<30 Days in the Church and in the World> Year 2, no. 1 (January
1989): 3.
2 Guillaume Bertier de Sauvigny and David Pinckney, , rev. and enlarged ed., French text trans. by Friguglietti
(Arlington Heights, Ill.: The Forum Press, 1983), 202-34; originally
published in 1973 as by Flammarion.
3 Etienne Gilson, [Authorized
Translation from the Third Revised and enlarged Edition of "Le
Thomisme" by Etienne Gilson] trans. by Edward Bullough, ed. by Rev.
G. A. Elrington, n. d., 327.
4 On the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy see Hans Maier,
, trans. by Emily M. Schossberger (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 123-25; originally published in 1965 by
Verlag Rombach and Co. as . See also
Bertier de Sauvigny and Pinckney, , 214.
5 Bertier de Sauvigny and Pinckney, , 223. See
also Poupard, "Liberty," <30 Days>, 65.
6 Ibid., 202-32. See also Poupard, "Liberty," <30 Days>, 65.
7 Among the best studies on the French revolutionaries attack against
the Church is Warren H. Carroll's recent (Manassas, Va.: Trinity Communications, 1986). See also
Christopher Dawson's brilliant analysis of the French Revolution,
, intro. by Arnold Toynbee, appreciation by
James Oliver (New York: Minerva Press, 1975), 83-100.
8 Bertier de Sauvigny and Pinckney, , 202-34.
9 Annabelle M. Melville, , vol. 1: (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1986), 28-43. See also Henry Blumenthal, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1975), 131-33.
10 Anita Rasi May, "Is 'Les Deux France' A Valid Frameword for
Interpreting the Nineteenth-Century Church? The French Episcopate as
a Case Study," LXXIII, no. 4
(October 1987): 541-61. See also Ruth Graham, "The Challenge of
Secularization to the Sacraments Under the First French Republic,"
LXVIII, no. 1 (January 1982): 13-27.
11 William J. Callahan, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 94.
12 Arnold R. Verduin, ,
foreword by Arthur S. Aiton (Ypsilanti, Mich.: University
Lithoprints, 1941), 11, Constitution of 1812, art. 12.
13 Stanley G. Payne,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 76-78. See also
Calahan, , 128-35.
14 Payne, , 77.
15 Ibid., 77-78.
16 Callahan, , 128.
17 Francisco Martinez de la Rosa, a noted man of letters, first
showed his moderate liberal views as a member of the liberal
government which came to power at Madrid in 1820. He served as prime
minister from 15 January 1834 through 7 June 1835. See Vicente Carcel
Orti, (Pamplona:
EUNSA, 1975), 222.
18 Patrick Foley, "The Catholic-Liberal Struggle and the Church in
Spain: 1834-76," (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of New Mexico,
1983), 79-104.
19 A number of Spanish historians have written on various aspects of
this issue, among them Carcel Orti, Melquiades Andres Martin, Manuel
Revuelta Gonzalez, S.J., Jose Andres Gallego, Jose Manuel Cuenca y
Toribio, Jose Longares Alonso, Miguel Angel Orcasitas, and Jose
Orlandis.
20 Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid, Spain, "Estado," libro 43d,
"Consejo de Estado, Actas," 20 May 1833, a royal decree.
21 Foley, "The Catholic-Liberal Struggle," 60-78.
22 The official report of the was published
as the
(Madrid: Imprenta de Don Miguel de Burgos, 1836).
23 Juan Saez Marin, ,
1768-1868 (Madrid: Editora Nacional, San Agostin, 5, 1975), 469-86.
24 Callahan, , 149-52.
25 Ibid., 153.
26 Foley, "Catholic-Liberal Struggle," 70-71.
27 Verduin, , 41, Constitution of
1837, art. 11.
28 Foley, "Catholic-Liberal Struggle," 147-70.
29 Saez Marin, , 15, 29.
30 Foley, "Catholic-Liberal Struggle," 66.
31 Verduin, , 60, Constitution of
1869, art. 21.
32 Ibid., 78, Constitution of 1876, art. 11.
received his Ph.D. in history from the University of
New Mexico. He is editor of the , Visiting Fellow at the College of Saint Thomas More,
and Professor of History at Tarrant Co. Jr. College.
This article was taken from the Winter 1990 issue of "Faith &
Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101
Shenandoah Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900, Fax 703-
636-1655. Published quarterly at $20.00 per year.
Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN
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